NIMMO: The Forbidden Criticism of Zionism
Oct 25, 2003
By Kurt Nimmo, CounterPunch

It's okay to call Muslims worshippers of Satan. That's essentially what far right Armageddon happy Lt. Gen. Boykin, newly appointed deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, did recently. It seems to be okay with Rumsfeld, Boykin's boss. It's more than okay for the likes of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and other Islam-hating Christian-Zionists. For them, denigrating Muslims is an industry.

"That's the way we live," Rummy told reporters Thursday during a Pentagon news briefing. "We're a free people. And that's the wonderful thing about our country. And I think that for anyone to run around and think that that can be managed and controlled is probably wrong... Saddam Hussein could do it pretty well, because he'd go around killing people if they said things he didn't like."

Of course, it depends who you criticize.

Remarks of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad aside, there is a campaign to portray criticism of Zionist state violence against essentially defenseless Palestinians as creeping anti-Semitism. "Liberals and leftists, traditional champions of the underdog, engage en masse in a form of fashionable, politically correct anti-Semitism by condemning Israel's 'racist,' 'apartheid,' 'Nazi' regime, portraying the tiny Jewish state (with 0.1 percent of the Mideast land mass) as the brutal aggressor Goliath, while casting the Arab world (with 99.9 percent of the land, and all of the oil) as David," writes Whistleblower Magazine.

Never mind that it's true -- Israel is a racist state.

Can you imagine the outcry if Americans passed a law denying citizenship to people of African descent who marry US citizens? The Israeli Knesset passed just such a law July 31, forcing Palestinians who marry Israelis to live "separate and unequal" lives from their spouses. "This law comes to address a security issue," Gideon Ezra, an Israeli cabinet minister, declared. "Since September 2000 we have seen a significant connection, in terror attacks, between Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs."

Get the connection here? Arabs are a "security issue," they are terrorists -- all of them, from the Hamas suicide bomber to the Israeli Arab grocer.

In fact, the state of Israel is predicated on racism and religious exclusivity. Consider Israel's 1950 law of return, which allows any person "born to a Jewish mother," or one "who converts to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion," to immigrate to Israel. "The fourth basic law is Israel's status law, which gives Israel's citizens with 'Jewish nationality' certain rights and privileges which are denied to Israel's citizens with 'Arab nationality,'" writes Shaw J. Dallal. "Chief among these rights is the ownership or use of the very land which was expropriated from the Palestinians."

But it's not simply Arabs who are discriminated against in Israel, but all Gentiles.

"I had personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refuse to allow his phone to be used on the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for a non-Jew who happened to collapse in his Jerusalem neighborhood," wrote Israel Shahak, a Hebrew University professor. The Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem ruled that the man had acted properly.

"We need to recognize that in Israel the real issue is discrimination not only against the Palestinians (including those who serve in the Israeli army, police and [the Israeli counter-intelligence and internal security service] Shabak), but against all non-Jews. This discrimination has the same character as that which the anti-Semites want to apply against the Jews," wrote Shahak. "Until the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment all Jews firmly believed that non-Jews should be discriminated against whenever possible. It now turns out that the Jewish Enlightenment failed to change the attitudes of all, or perhaps even of most, Jews in this respect. Many completely irreligious Jews still believe that for the sake of the Jewish tradition which commanded discrimination against non-Jews, the latter should be discriminated against in the 'Jewish state' forever."

It's forbidden to say such things.

Simply pointing out the reality of state-sanctioned Israeli racism against non-Jews is considered anti-Semitic. "The Left continues to spin out this 'Good Jew/Bad Jew' dichotomy in its baseless distinction between Judaism and Zionism," writes David Rosen, a professor of anthropology and law at Fairleigh Dickison University. "The return to Zion is a central part of Jewish discourse and cannot be exorcised from Jewish life... The crucial issue is whether the criticism respects the Jewish right of self-determination and Israel's existence as a sovereign state."

In other words, the theft of Palestinian land and the murder of Palestinian children "cannot be exorcised from Jewish life" and criticism of it disrespects "the Jewish right of self-determination and Israel's existence as a sovereign state."

Bush and Rumsfeld are promoting Zionist racism with the appointment of Lt. Gen. Boykin, who likes to go around saying the Judaic-based God adopted by the Christian-Zionists is better than Allah (according to Boykin, Muslims worship an "idol" and not "a real God").

"According to God's distribution of nations, the Land of Israel has been given to the Jewish people as an everlasting covenant," declares the Third International Christian Zionist Congress. "The Jewish people have the absolute right to possess and dwell in the Land, including Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan."

Remember: according to Zionists such as Yaffa Ganz (and Alan Dershowitz) before the Zionists grabbed Palestine, it was "a poverty stricken, forlorn, empty area." So empty was Palestine that, according to census figures taken during the British mandate, 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs lived there.

Simply questioning such absurdities as the Zionist slogan -- "Land without people for a people with no land" -- means you're an anti-Semite and you want to push the Jews into the sea.

"Are we not allowed to criticize the Jews if they do things which are wrong?" Mahathir Mohamad asked after he was accused of anti-Semitism. "If Muslims can be accused of being terrorists, then others can accuse the Jews of being terrorists also."

Not in America, Mahathir.

Ahmed Yousef and Betty Molchany: "For more than 50 years, Americans have been taught to hate through Hollywood, television, the radio, and print media. Throughout these years, more than 800 movies have depicted Arabs and Muslims unfavorably, with no positive attributes. Many television programs, such as Law and Order and The West Wing, also present negative portrayals of Arabs and Muslims. It has been an unrelenting campaign of defamation and instigation prompted and inflamed by right-wing Zionists and extremist Christian coalitions which are unconditionally allied with Israel -- no matter what crimes she commits, no matter how many UN resolutions she violates, no matter her illegal occupation of other countries, no matter her possession and use of weapons of mass destruction. The objective of both the Christian and Jewish Zionists is not only to remove all Arabs, Christian as well as Muslim, from Palestine, but also to allow Israel to control the neighboring countries. To accomplish this, these political Zionists are determined to remove the voice of Muslims in the United States and with it any support for Palestinians and neighboring Arabs. Political Zionist organizations, such as the Project for a New American Century, create unjustified fear of countries, such as Iraq, which are predominantly Muslim and push for pre-emptive attacks, assassinations, war, and domination."

It's forbidden to say such things... even if they're true.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, will be published this fall by Dandelion Books.